How to manage click tracking

Klaviyo can stop recording email click events at three levels: across your whole account, for individual recipients, or for a single link.

This article explains what click tracking is, what turning it off does, and how to manage it at each of those three levels.

What click tracking is

Klaviyo records an email click using a tracked link. Links in the messages you send are rewritten to route through Klaviyo, and when a recipient clicks one, Klaviyo records a “Clicked Email” event on that recipient’s profile before sending them on to the destination. Click events feed downstream systems such as reporting, attribution, segmentation, and flow triggers.

When you turn off click tracking for your account or for a recipient, links still route through Klaviyo, but Klaviyo does not record the click. Recipients still reach the destination normally, and unsubscribe links are unaffected.

Click tracking controls apply to email clicks only. Turning click tracking off does not affect open tracking or any other channel. Turning off all email tracking requires two separate steps. To fully stop tracking, you must also turn off open tracking separately. See How to manage open tracking for those steps.

Before you begin

• You decide who is in scope. You are responsible for determining which recipients you want to stop recording clicks for, and for setting these controls accordingly. Klaviyo does not decide this for you.
• Click tracking is on by default. Klaviyo records clicks unless you turn tracking off for your account, set a recipient to unsubscribed from click tracking, or turn it off on a specific link.
• Changes take effect going forward, right away. When you turn off click tracking, Klaviyo stops recording new clicks immediately, including clicks on emails already sitting in a recipient’s inbox. Clicks that were already recorded stay in place. Likewise, when click tracking is turned on, Klaviyo begins recording new clicks immediately.
• Your account setting overrides individual consent. If click tracking is off for your account, Klaviyo records no clicks at all, whatever individual recipients are set to.
• Click tracking consent is separate from email marketing consent. Changing a recipient’s click tracking consent never changes whether they are subscribed to your email marketing.

What turning off click tracking affects

When click tracking is off for your account or for a recipient, Klaviyo does not record click data for them. This affects:

• Click rate, clicks, and click to open rate, along with the human click variants of those metrics, and the clicks shown in recipient activity, link activity, and audience or segment breakdowns. Recipients who still receive your emails but aren’t tracked won’t register clicks, so these numbers reflect fewer people than actually clicked.
• Conversions and revenue attributed to a click. If a conversion’s only qualifying touchpoint in your attribution window was a click, and that click wasn’t recorded, Klaviyo will attribute the conversion to another touchpoint if one exists (per your attribution settings, such as an email open or an engagement event on another channel). Your attribution model settings aren’t changed by click tracking consent, only the click data feeding into them. See How to change your attribution model to review which interactions count toward attribution for your account.
• Segmentation based on click activity. This includes engagement based segments you may already rely on for list hygiene and sunset flows.
• Flow triggers that rely on click events.
• Bot click reporting. Bot click filtering works by classifying recorded click events, so clicks that were never recorded do not appear in bot click reports either.

If you turn off click tracking on a single link, only clicks on that link are affected. Everything else in the message is tracked as usual.

Metrics based on other activity, including open rate, delivery rate, bounce rate, spam complaint rate, unsubscribe rate, and conversions or revenue attributed to another non-click touchpoint, are not affected.

Turn off click tracking for your entire account

This is the simplest way to stop recording clicks. It applies to every email your account sends.

1. Click your account name in the lower left, then click Settings.
2. Go to Email > Tracking.
3. Uncheck Track email clicks.
4. Save your changes.

Any user with access to your email settings can change this. When Track email clicks is off, Klaviyo stops recording clicks for all of your account’s email messages.

Manage click tracking for individual recipients

Collecting a recipient’s consent before tracking their clicks may be required under certain regional privacy laws. Setting click tracking consent per recipient lets you scope tracking to the recipients who have given consent, rather than turning off click tracking for everyone you send to.

Click tracking consent is stored per recipient and per email address, so a profile with more than one email address needs consent set for each email you want to stop tracking. A recipient can be:

• Subscribed: clicks are recorded.
• Unsubscribed: clicks are not recorded.
• Never Subscribed: no explicit consent has been set. Clicks are recorded.

Because click tracking is on by default, you only need to act on the recipients you want to stop tracking. Set those recipients to unsubscribed from click tracking using any of the methods below.

Step 1: Identify the recipients in scope

Decide which recipients you need to stop recording clicks for. You can use profile data to help build this audience.

Step 2: Set click tracking consent to unsubscribed

Using a CSV file (list import)

You can set click tracking consent in bulk with a list import, the same way you bulk-remove email marketing consent. Include a column for click tracking consent in your file and set the value to unsubscribed for each recipient you want to stop tracking:

Email,Click Tracking Consent
sarah@example.org,UNSUBSCRIBED

To import:

1. Go to Audience > Lists & segments and select the list you want to use, or create a new one.
2. Open the Manage list dropdown and click Import contacts.
3. Click Upload and select your CSV file.
4. Map your click tracking consent column to Click Tracking Consent, then finish the import.

Setting click tracking consent does not change a recipient’s email marketing consent. As with any list import, the contacts in your file are added to the list you import into. For more on the import flow, see How to import subscribers to a list.

Using SFTP or a data warehouse sync

The same Click Tracking Consent column works for SFTP imports and data warehouse syncs. Map the column to click tracking consent and set the value to UNSUBSCRIBED.

Using the API

You can set click tracking consent with the Subscribe and Unsubscribe Profiles bulk endpoints. Click tracking consent is a separate object under subscriptions.email, alongside marketing consent, and changing it does not affect marketing consent.

To stop recording clicks for a recipient, unsubscribe them from click tracking with POST /api/profile-subscription-bulk-delete-jobs:

{
  "data": {
    "type": "profile-subscription-bulk-delete-job",
    "attributes": {
      "profiles": {
        "data": [
          {
            "type": "profile",
            "attributes": {
              "email": "sarah@example.com",
              "subscriptions": { "email": { "click_tracking": { "consent": "UNSUBSCRIBED" } } }
            }
          }
        ]
      }
    }
  }
}

To start recording clicks again, subscribe them to click tracking with POST /api/profile-subscription-bulk-create-jobs and a consent value of SUBSCRIBED.

Setting consent for new recipients (advanced)

There is no built-in flow action to set click tracking consent, so there is no fully native way to set it for brand-new recipients as they are added. If you need to do this, you can add a webhook action to a flow that calls the API to set click tracking consent for the new recipient. Because click tracking is on by default until consent is set, order the webhook before any send action and trigger the flow as early as possible, so no click is recorded before the recipient is set to unsubscribed.

Check a recipient’s click tracking consent

Open a recipient’s profile to see their click tracking status. If you haven’t set explicit consent for that recipient, you won’t see an Email click tracking row on their profile at all. That’s expected: it means Klaviyo hasn’t recorded an explicit choice for them, so their clicks are still being tracked under the default. Once you set a recipient to Subscribed or Unsubscribed, using any of the methods above, an Email click tracking row appears on their profile with that status. You can also retrieve click tracking consent through the Get Profiles API under subscriptions.email.click_tracking.

Track consent changes over time

Every change to a recipient’s click tracking consent, whether made through a list import, sync, or the API, is recorded as a timestamped event on their profile, the same way other consent changes are.

Use the Events API to retrieve this history:

• Filter by profile_id to see one recipient’s complete click tracking consent history.
• Filter by metric_id to see changes across your account. Consent grants and revocations are separate metrics, Consented to Click Tracking and Revoked Click Tracking Consent, so include both to see every change.

This is the recommended way to produce a record of when a recipient’s click tracking consent changed.

Manage click tracking for a single link

If you want to keep click tracking on generally but stop recording clicks on one specific link, add clicktracking=off to that link’s HTML tag:

<a clicktracking=off href="https://example.com">Klaviyo Homepage</a>

Klaviyo will not record clicks on that link. Every other link in the message is tracked as usual, and neither your account setting nor any recipient’s click tracking consent is changed.

Related articles

• How to manage open tracking
• How to change your attribution model
• Understanding unique vs. total opens and clicks
• Understanding consent in profiles
• Understanding bot clicks